History is shaped by the ideas of individuals. Regardless of circumstances, some people cultivate these ideas and rise to the pinnacle of success. One such company that started with humble beginnings and later achieved monumental success, still holding a special place in people's hearts, is Apple.
Apple was founded by Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak on April 1, 1976—famously known as April Fool's Day. To launch the venture, 21-year-old Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus for $1,500, while Wozniak sold his Hewlett-Packard calculator for $500. They used the money from these sales as seed capital to build Apple.
That same day, they introduced their first product, the Apple I. A local computer dealer played a crucial role in the company's growth by securing an order for 100 units of the computer for $50,000. To fulfill this order within a one-month timeframe, they took out a small loan.
With the support of family and friends, they managed to complete the order and pay their suppliers just in time, earning their first revenue.
Later, Jobs and Wozniak met Armas Clifford Markkula, a former manager at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Markkula played a pivotal role in Apple's development.
He helped draft a business plan and invested $92,000, which allowed them to secure a $250,000 line of credit. Apple priced each Apple I unit at $666.66, earning a profit of approximately $774,000. Just three years after launching the Apple II, the company's sales soared to $139 million.
In 1980, Apple became a publicly traded company, marking a major turning point. On the first day of trading, Apple's market value reached $1.2 billion. By the end of the day, the company's market capitalization had risen to $1.8 billion, a remarkable achievement from its humble beginnings in Jobs’s garage.
In 1983, Jobs recruited John Sculley from Pepsi-Cola to become the CEO of Apple. The following year, they launched and marketed the Macintosh. Despite its superior performance and strong sales compared to IBM PCs, the Macintosh faced compatibility issues with IBM systems.
Due to internal disagreements within the company, Jobs eventually left Apple, the company he had co-founded, in 1985. However,
ഐബിഎം സിസ്റ്റങ്ങളുമായി താരതമ്യം ചെയ്യുമ്പോൾ ചില കംബാറ്റിയബിലിറ്റി പ്രശ്നങ്ങൾ മാക്കിൻ്റോഷിനുണ്ടായിരുന്നു.
he returned as CEO in 1997, playing a critical role in turning around the company, which was then on the brink of bankruptcy.
Over time, Apple transitioned from being a personal computer company to becoming a leader in cutting-edge digital products. By the time of Jobs's death in 2011, Apple's market value had reached $391 billion.
Source: Benzinga
